Word: greengrass
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...those rare moments when the movie slows down, as it does for plot-requisite conversations at the beginning and the end, that The Bourne Ultimatum seems empty and ill-used, like an interrogation room after a waterboarding. Greengrass cuts each action scene into agitated bits; but he can't let fast enough alone. Could he please explain why, in the chat scenes, the camera is afflicted with Parkinson's? The film frame trembles, obscures the speaker with the listener's shoulder, annoys viewers and distracts them from the content of the scene. It surely interrupted my enjoyment of the movie...
...Greengrass isn't alone among serious directors who, when they make an action film, want it to be More Than. Well, forget that. Just get an audience caught up in the Bourne web. Making a good action film is its own conspicuous achievement, and Greengrass is a superb spinner of plates. And conductor of stunts. And car scenes. Bourne runs through three or four each movie - those indestructo-cars that can be rammed and smashed, spun, stripped and flipped and still outrace and outlast all pursuers...
...Damon, Greengrass has an improbable but plausible Bourne. Moviegoers are so used to seeing Damon smile that he becomes someone else when he relaxes his features. His Bourne is a man of three expressions: going blank, which gives his features the slackness of a new corpse; showing wariness of imminent danger or unmasking, like a naughty schoolboy who realizes he's being watched; and, an instant later, getting taut, in situations where he expects the worst and tries to be prepared for it. The strategy is simple but effective. Damon uses the ordinariness of his appearance to help make Bourne...
...need to be butch! Butcher and more intense." That's darned good advice for an NFL lineman, a carjacker ... or an action-movie star forced to start filming while awaiting pivotal script pages. It was Paul Greengrass's direction for Matt Damon when they commenced shooting this summer's globe-galloping thriller The Bourne Ultimatum without a finished screenplay. "I didn't know where I had come from. I didn't know where I was going--which are things you really need to know as an actor," says Damon, who reprises his role as conflicted assassin Jason Bourne...
...silences in his roles as shadowy figures in films like The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Departed. The director's signature is his spare and painstaking re-creation of historical events, as in 2002's Bloody Sunday and last year's Oscar-nominated United 93. As individuals, Damon and Greengrass never, ever overdo it. But as a team, these gurus of understated storytelling have flourished in and elevated the most bombastic of genres, the summer action-movie franchise...